


Think On This

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Community: watsons_woes, Gen, Smoking, Wordcount: 100-1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 22:11:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11564349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: “All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other…” – The Norwood Builder





	Think On This

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2017 July Watson's Woes Promptfest prompt #20, **Time For a Little Research**. The story title comes from a 17th-century song about tobacco.

Persistent coughs, short breath, and so many of them winding up with inoperable cancers. And only one thing in common, whether it was one of Mycroft’s club men setting down his hand-carved teakwood pipe to deal with a coughing fit, or a grimy Limehouse dockworker with a penny Woodbine perpetually dangling from his lower lip, or an old Irish laundress puffing on a short-stemmed clay nose-warmer.

Over and over I perused the current medical texts and the latest publications. There were some warnings about its use leading to indigestion or troubles of the heart, mostly directed at the middle and upper class – nothing to warn off the poor who smoked or took snuff. The only other discussions of the topic consisted of admonitions about gentlemanly etiquette regarding the removal of pipes or cigars whilst passing a lady, and even a few medical men who claimed that it was a treatment for asthma.

High or low, that cough was the same, as was the foul brown sputum like London fog, and cancers that blossomed in the murk. Worse, smoking was not only on the rise but a certain population of women now smoked defiantly as proof that they were men’s equals and to shock the older generation (despite myself I smiled at reading of a disturbance in a café engendered by a young woman lighting a cigarette).

I felt like my friend, grimly trying to swim upstream against an avalanche of public and professional opinion. But among the things Sherlock Holmes has taught me it is to trust what I sense to be true, once the impossible is eliminated.

And in the very midst of these studies I’d been making…I looked down and saw that I had taken my pipe in hand utterly without thought on the matter, ready to fill it and light up as a thinking aid. And I thought of the many times I’d bitterly admonished Holmes for using cocaine to stimulate and clear his brain.

I began to wonder if tobacco, in addition to being more dangerous than was currently believed, might not also be addictive too.  



End file.
